Weekend Reads 2/13/16

Why I Taught Myself to Procrastinate

Our first ideas, after all, are usually our most conventional.…When you procrastinate, you’re more likely to let your mind wander. That gives you a better chance of stumbling onto the unusual and spotting unexpected patterns.

The Government Might Subpoena Your Toaster

For police, this means less work: Why go through the trouble of gathering data on you if you’ve already given that data to a corporation, which keeps it in a nice, tidy database on a server in Iowa? The government doesn’t even need to notify the subject of a subpoena that they’re downloading his or her data from a third party.

The science for climate change only feeds the denial: how do you beat that?

When this small group of strong free-market supporters were told about the 97% consensus, their trust in scientists fell even lower. My research indicated that this response was driven by an expectation that climate scientists would falsify evidence to support human-caused global warming – a thought pattern characteristic of conspiratorial thinking.

'Slacktivism' works: Study shows people who like and retweet political slogans help protesters spread their message

The data showed most modern protests have a minority who are physically active and a much larger group - dubbed "the critical periphery" - who may tweet about it only once or twice but are responsible for doubling the protest’s reach.